The Illustrated Man (film)

Did You Know?

• In August 2007, Zack Snyder signed on to direct a remake with Alex Tse as screenwriter; as of 2024, the remake has not appeared.
• The 2009 script for the proposed remake included the stories 'The Illustrated Man', 'The Veldt', and 'The Concrete Mixer'.

Plot

A drifter named Carl, traveling with his dog Peke, meets a hitchhiker named Willie on America's backroads. Carl's body is covered in what he calls "skin illustrations"—never tattoos—that animate when someone stares directly at them, each one telling a story from the future. He recounts three tales: "The Veldt," where a virtual reality nursery in a futuristic home lets children trap their parents inside to be killed by lions, later witnessed by a horrified child psychologist; "The Long Rain," about astronauts on Venus driven mad by endless rain as they search for a sun dome, with only one sane survivor finding a working shelter; and "The Last Night of the World," depicting the apocalypse. A prologue explains Carl got his illustrations from a mysterious woman named Felicia at a remote farmhouse. The story ends when Willie stares at the one bare patch on Carl's skin and sees a vision of his own murder by Carl. Willie attacks Carl and flees into the night, with Carl still alive and in pursuit, leaving Willie's fate unknown.

Production

The film adapts three science fiction short stories from Ray Bradbury's collection The Illustrated Man. Howard B. Kreitsek wrote the screenplay, and Jack Smight directed. Bradbury was not consulted for the adaptation. Smight chose three stories from the eighteen in the collection and used the carnival sideshow freak from the collection's prologue and epilogue as the film's primary narrative. He cast Rod Steiger as the tattooed man, having known him since the 1950s.

Reception

The Illustrated Man was considered a critical and financial failure. Time wrote that responsibility for the failure rested with director Jack Smight, who committed 'every possible error of style and taste,' including letting Steiger 'chew up every piece of scenery in sight.' Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the screenplay 'unsharp, without focus' and found the film to have 'moments of eerie beauty' but believed the director was limited by the screenplay, saying 'everything remains foetus-like and underdeveloped, although shrouded in misty pretensions of grandeur.' Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that Smight's 'confused, wandering film never does quite come to terms with what it wants to be,' pointing to 'inadequate attention' to audience expectations. Ray Bradbury said Rod Steiger was 'very good in it, but it wasn't a good film ... the script was terrible.' According to John Stanley, the film was 'a major disappointment' as the script failed to capture the poetry or imagination of Bradbury's collection. The film was nominated for the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation but did not win. A 2006 retrospective review noted that the counterculture of the 1960s was evident and that its depiction of the future did not age well. The 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood features a radio advertisement of The Illustrated Man, and it appears on that film's soundtrack.